Album Review: Spektr – Cypher

Spektr prepared to release a profound record

Since forming thirteen years ago, Spektr has slit a deep, gushing slash in what we know as black metal, reinventing the classic, harsh BM sound again and again without sacrificing a scrap of ferocity. While most artists choose to stray from the fold by way of mellower and more ambient expressions, Spektr takes the music in hand like the neck of the pious, twisting and twisting ’til it snaps.

Spektr hails from France (of course) and is comprised of the mysterious members kl.k. and Hth. Even if you are familiar with the duo, you will still be in awe of Cypher, their new album set for release on February 19th in North America. With crackling pianos, mystifying sound clips, and spiraling walls of guitars, Spektr takes you to a deep psychedelic plane inhabited by haunting beings wandering yawning vistas of dimensions incomprehensible.

Listening to Cypher makes you feel like you are having an exhausting out-of-body journey. It rips you from the floating reality, down into the meditative depths of psychosis. The composition is so charged with hysteria and a feeling of depersonalization that deeply listening to it will make you feel dazed for hours or days after, depending on how impressionable you are.

Cypher has no vocals. The rapid musical thoughts speak for themselves a thousand curses. On the technical side, the mixing of the album is extremely important. It has been mastered not like a typical recording, but instead cut and innovatively textured. The sound has been welded together like a compositional weapon and imbued with all varieties of supersonic, psychedelic ammunition.

The album starts and stumbles, rips and bends. The music sways on the edge of heavy, blunt basswork and ricocheting drums, overflowing with staticky, remorseless guitars that expand and contract, sometimes pushing other instruments back into the mix. Several curtainless ambient takeovers arrive and disperse, staying just long enough for you to brace yourself for the fall as Spektr flows out from the abyss below in a plethora of inverted light and ravenous, wavelike noise.

Infinitely dark and beautifully enthralling, Spektr’s latest inter-dimensional masterpiece will darken Europe today, February 5th. What’s left of the world can tune in and drop out on February 19th when the fallout of Cypher reigns down from Agonia Records.